Rationale, aims and objectives Creating networked business models is one of the innovative approaches that have the ability and potential for meeting market needs. The purpose of this study is to provide a decision making model for a fair profit sharing among the members of a diagnostic laboratory network while providing a distinctive value for the patients. Methods To identify the members of the network of laboratories, a suitable approach to calculate members’ efficiency scores is proposed. Then, the network members are classified into three groups based on their performance scores. The three groups help administrators identify eligible members, members who need to improve their performance in order to meet the minimum requirements, and members who do not qualify for admission to the network. Since the performance of the members should play a significant role in the fair profit sharing mechanism, the fair allocation of profits among network members is done by the use of Shapely’s value based on the efficiency scores of members. Results The results show that for such a fair mechanism, the efficiency and sample size (the number of samples (blood, urine) taken from the patients by the laboratories), as the two effective factors, have a decisive role in the share of profit of laboratory units of the network. In the Laboratory Services Network, members receive a number of samples according to their performance. As a result, the sample size received has a direct impact on the net income of each member. Conclusion In conclusion, it is evident that the use of Shapely value may help managers in the process of sharing profits among network members in a fair way, thereby improving network performance. In this way, incentive strategies may be created for the members of the network and long-term survival of the network may be achieved.

Rationale, aims and objectives: The diversity of safety signals (e.g., case reports, animal studies and observational studies) makes the assessment of the (un-)safety of a drug a formidable challenge. While frequentist viewpoints to uncertain inference struggle in aggregating these signals, the more flexible Bayesian approaches seem better suited for this quest. Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers great promise to these approaches for information retrieval, decision support and leaning probabilities from data. E-Synthesis is a Bayesian framework for drug safety assessments build on philosophical principles and considerations. It aims to aggregate all the available information, in order to provide a Bayesian probability of a drug causing an adverse reaction. We delineate and assess ways in which AI can support E-Synthesis. Results: We find that AI can help with information retrieval, usability (graphical decision making aids), learning Bayes factors from historical data, assessing quality of information and determining conditional probabilities for the so-called “indicators” of causation for E-Synthesis. Conclusions: Properly applied, AI can help the transition of philosophical principles and considerations concerning evidence aggregation for drug safety to a tool that can be used in practise.

Rationale, Aims and Objectives: Guidelines recommend inviting family members of intensive care unit (ICU) patients to rounds. We aimed to create a toolkit to support family participation in ICU bedside rounds, based upon evidence from research and in collaboration with ICU family member representatives and healthcare providers. Methods: A multi-method qualitative research program was conducted to provide an evidence-base. Ethnographic observations of rounds and interviews and focus groups with family members and ICU healthcare providers were analyzed for key themes, barriers and facilitators of participation, and suggestions. A full day workshop with family representatives and providers (physicians, nurses, social workers, and unit managers) from a diverse range of adult ICUs in Western Canada, including several community ICUs and a majority of large, urban ICUs enabled the collaborative development of key toolkit elements. Results: We have developed an evidence-informed approach to patient-and-family-centered rounds that highlights the importance of 6 key elements foundational to patient and family centered rounds: Invitation, Orientation, Engagement, Summary, Questions, and Communication Follow-Up. We describe strategies, techniques, and templates to optimize these elements and interactions so that communication is more meaningful, and to facilitate the ability of family members to adopt a meaningful role as contributing members of the care team. Conclusion: There is consensus on general strategies for facilitating family participation in rounds and meaningful communication between family and the healthcare team during rounds as an important element of the continuum of communication in the ICU. The incorporation of these elements should be standardized, though tailored to user needs.

This paper begs an ontological question about the nature of health and challenges some underpinning assumptions in western healthcare. In its analysis, the structure of health, in its various statuses, is framed as a complex adaptive system made up of dynamically interacting subsystems that include the physiological, psychological, spiritual, social, cultural, and more, realms. Furthermore, openness in complex systems such as health, is necessary for the exchange of energy, information, and resources. Yet, within healthcare much effort is invested in constraining systems’ behaviours, whether they be systems of knowledge, states of health, models of care, and more. This paper draws on the complexity sciences and Levinasian philosophy to explicate the essential role of system openness in individual and population health, and the viability of healthcare systems. It highlights holism to be ‘not whole-ism’, and system openness to be, not just a reality, but a critical feature of viability. Hence requisite openness is advocated as essential to efficacious and ethical healthcare practice and strategy, and vital for good quality health.

Objective: High data quality is essential to ensure the validity of clinical and research inferences based on it. However, these data quality assessments are often missing even though these data are used in daily practice and research. Our objective was to evaluate the data quality of our high-resolution electronic database (HRDB) implemented in our pediatric intensive care unit (PICU). Design: A prospective validation study of a HRDB. Setting: A 32-bed pediatric medical, surgical and cardiac PICU in a tertiary care freestanding maternal-child health center in Canada. Population: All patients admitted to the PICU with at least one vital sign monitored using a cardiorespiratory monitor connected to the central monitoring station. Interventions: None Measurements and Main Results: Between June 2017 and August 2018, data from 295 patient days were recorded from medical devices and 4,645 data points were video recorded and compared to the corresponding data collected in the HRDB. Statistical analysis showed an excellent overall correlation (R2=1), accuracy (100%), agreement (bias=0, limits of agreement=0), completeness (2% missing data) and reliability (ICC=1) between recorded and collected data within clinically significant pre-defined limits of agreement. Divergent points could all be explained. Conclusions: This prospective validation of a representative sample showed an excellent overall data quality.

Rationale and objectives: Changes in, and predictors of, quality of life (QoL) among unstable angina patients are informative for both clinical and public health practice. However, there is little research on this topic, especially in healthcare settings with limited resources. This study aims to detect changes in QoL and its associated factors among patients with unstable angina after percutaneous coronary intervention. Methods: A quasi-experimental design was conducted with two repeated rounds of measurements, one month and three months after intervention, using the generic SF-36 questionnaire, in 120 patients from Vietnam National Heart Institute. A linear mixed-effects model was used to assess changes in patient QoL over time while adjusting for other covariates. Results: Only 2 out of 8 QoL subscales (social functioning and emotional well-being) declined after one month, but these tended to rise again after three months, while scores of all other QoL subscales increased. Adjusting for covariates, QoL increased slightly after one month of intervention (β=0.65, 95%CI=-0.86-2.16) but improved by almost 6 QoL points after 3 months (β=5.99, 95%CI=4.48-7.50). Four confounders significantly associated with a decline in QoL were older age, being retired, living in rural areas, and having abnormal troponin level. Conclusion: QoL of the patients with unstable angina improves significantly three months after intervention, rather than after one month. To increase QoL, it is important to address risk factors and to improve the quality of healthcare delivery.

Academic journal publication is the currency of University faculty. It can go without saying that publications play an important role in securing an academic appointment and research grants, achieving promotion within the University, and more importantly, advancing knowledge, which is to me the primary purpose of any academic pursuit. Despite its importance, academics seem to receive little or no formal training in how to prepare a manuscript for publication or how to respond to reviewer criticism1. Quite often, such skills are acquired through mentorship during graduate training. Unfortunately, it is often the case that graduate students do not produce enough manuscripts during their training to develop expertise in how to translate completed research or scholarship into a published report. As an editor, I often see manuscripts that are diminished by how they are written, which often causes confusion in the reviewer, resulting in a recommendation for rejection. I do not profess to be an expert on writing for an academic audience. I have no idea exactly how I learned to get my work published (I assume it was through practice and good mentorship), nor do I have any idea if I am skilled at it – I am left to assume my level of expertise from my successes and failures. However, from reading several manuscripts each day, I have picked up on some common errors and have developed an appreciation for what editors and reviewers expect in a published manuscript. In what follows, I present a bit of what I have learned in my, albeit it short, time as an editor.2

Motion capture and analysis techniques are emerging in the surgical education and surgical education research literature as viable ways to augment the assessment of technical skills. In particular, these methods provide an opportunity to reveal objective information about the efficiency of surgical procedures, above and beyond the accuracy of procedural outcomes. One assessment that is very prevalent in the literature are counts of the number of movements a surgeon makes in completing a technical performance. In this commentary, the number of movements metric is explored from kinesiology and engineering perspectives; two disciplines that have contributed heavily to the development of rigorous motion analysis methods. Furthermore, the assumption that skill efficiency improves linearly as a learner progresses along the continuum of expertise is challenged. While movement efficiency does certainly improve, this assumption does not necessarily capture the way that learners flexibly prioritize particular aspects of performance in the intermediate stages of skill learning. By way of this commentary, important a priori decisions that should proceed effective motion capture and analysis are highlighted, a call for the standardization of procedures is made, and an opportunity to better understand the way that computerized movement analysis techniques may contribute (or be detrimental) to competency constructs in surgical education and assessment is realized.

One knowledge translation method, of putting evidence into practice, is the use of clinical practice guidelines (CPG). The purpose of this brief report is to describe an 8-step process of “how to” contextualise a training programme to increase CPG-uptake for a targeted audience in a clearly defined setting. This process may assist implementalists to fast-track the development of contextualised training to improve CPG-uptake.

Background and Aims Current guidance advises that at least 90% of anterior cruciate ligament reconstructions are performed as day case operations. Same-day surgery rates achieved by surgical units have significant clinical and financial implications. The primary aim of this multi-centre study was to determine the rate of admission and causes for admissions in patients undergoing anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction. Method Patient documentations were studied for those who underwent an elective anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction between January 2015 and April 2019. Contributing factors related to admission length were investigated and included patient age, gender, body mass index (BMI), operating surgeon, operating hospital, American Society of Anaesthesiology (ASA) grade, and position of the patient on the operating list. Both univariate and multivariate analysis was conducted using the STATA/IC 16.1 statistical package. Results The day surgery rate of anterior cruciate ligament reconstructions were 52% (50/95). Patients positioned later on the operating list were more likely to be admitted post-operatively (OR – 4.49; p=0.002; 95% CI – 1.72-11.69) and this was the only factor associated with admission. A large majority of admitted patients (95.6%) were admitted without a clinical cause and were otherwise safe for same-day discharge. Conclusions The day surgery rate for ACL reconstruction remains low, despite an extremely low complication rate. Reconfiguration of the operating lists and positioning anterior cruciate ligament reconstructions earlier in the day will likely increase the same-day discharge rate.

Rationale, aims and objectives: People living with dementia admitted to hospitals are more likely to experience poorer outcomes than people without dementia. Caregivers play an important role in managing medications across transitions of care. This qualitative study explores the experiences and perspectives of caregivers about the medication management guidance provided at hospital discharge. Methods: A qualitative approach using semi-structured, telephone interviews was conducted with 31 caregivers of people with dementia across Australia. Purposive sampling was used to ensure maximum variation of diverse experiences and perspectives. Results: Caregivers’ experiences of medication guidance for people with dementia at discharge were described in three themes including: a) inadequate information about medication management at discharge; b) limited caregiver engagement in medication management decisions; and c) difficulties ensuring medication supply post discharge. Most participants indicated they would like to be included in discussions at discharge. However, participation was influenced by caregivers being overwhelmed by discharge processes; proactively seeking information on medication-related harm; and belief in advocacy as part of their caregiver role. Caregivers reported they would like to receive a tailored medication list for people with dementia which included information on medications that may impact on the patient’s cognition, and for hospital staff to communicate with both the community pharmacist and primary care physician, to improve co-ordination post transition. Discussion: In our study of caregivers of people with dementia, we identified key recommendations that could be tested to facilitate regular participation of people living with dementia and their caregiver around medication guidance at discharge.

Abstract Rationale: Our current global healthcare system is not sustainable. It is structured based on the principles of reductionist science which was discovered and developed over the past 400 – 600 years. Because of increasing pace of change and increasing complexity in our world we have increased fragmentation in our healthcare system leading to more harm and waste. Over 100 years ago, the principles of systems, or complexity, science were discovered, first in the discipline of physics. These principles accommodate the constant change and biologic variability in our world. While reductionist principles would be applicable in a static, mechanical world where parts of the system could be isolated, this does not exist in the real biologic world. Method: For the past decade, our abdominal wall hernia team has been applying the principles of systems science to real patient care. Some of the tools we have applied include continuous quality improvement for whole hernia patient processes and non-linear analytical tools to gain insight to improve value-based outcomes. Until we learn to apply and scale these principles across our whole global healthcare system, we will continue to suffer the consequences of our current unsustainable system. Results: We have learned that the application of systems and complexity science to real patient care can lead to lower costs and better outcomes in the context of patients with complex hernia problems. However, these concepts have not yet been adopted in our global healthcare system. Conclusion: Applying the principles of systems and complexity science to our global healthcare system has the potential to lower costs and improve patient outcomes for any patient care process to which it is applied.

Rationale, aims and objectives. Applying traditional industrial Quality Improvement (QI) methodologies to primary care is often inappropriate because primary care is best thought of as a network of highly interconnected agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS) that is particularly responsive to bottom-up rather than top-down management approaches. We report on a demonstration case study of improvements made in the Family Health Center (FHC) of the JPS Health Network in a refugee patient population that illustrate features of QI in a CAS framework as opposed to a traditional QI approach. Methods. We report on changes in health system utilization by new refugee patients of the FHC from 2016-2017 and summarize relevant theoretical understandings of quality management in complex adaptive systems. Results. Applying CAS principles in the FHC, utilization of the Emergency Department and Urgent Care by newly arrived refugee patients before their first clinic visit was reduced by more than half (total visits decreased from 31% to 14% of the refugee patients). Our review of the literature demonstrates that traditional top-down QI processes are most often unsuccessful in improving even a few single-disease metrics, and increases clinician burnout and penalizes clinicians who care for vulnerable patients. Improvement in a CAS occurs when front-line clinicians identify care gaps and are given the flexibility to learn and self-organize to enable new care processes to emerge, which are created from bottom-up leadership that utilize existing interdependencies made more sustainable as front-line clinicians use sensemaking to improve care processes. Conclusions and future directions. Recent reforms announced in primary care in Scotland, a few examples in the medical literature, and statements from some healthcare system leaders are examples of early adapters who are applying the principles of CAS to their QI efforts. Such initiatives and our example provide models for others to follow.

TitleOn Metabolism: Ensuring Our Health Care System Remains “Ready-to-Hand”

Rationale, aims and objectives The article looks at how, during consultations, pregnant women identified as presenting an increased risk of giving birth to a child with an impairment, and practitioners in the field of prenatal diagnosis, decide whether or not to accept the risk of a miscarriage and proceed with a diagnostic examination. Methods We conducted 63 observations of consultations in France and 22 in England. Participants were women for whom an elevated risk of abnormality had been identified and the practitioners involved in their care. Our analytical approach consisted in suspending the normative concepts of non-directiveness and autonomy, and in drawing on Goffman’s (1974) notion of “frame” to take account of the experiential and structural aspects that the protagonists bring into the (inter)actions. Results We identified four frames: medico-scientific expertise, medical authority, religious authority and compassion. Observation of the ways in which the frames intertwine during consultations revealed configurations that facilitate or hinder the fluidity of the interactions and the decision-making process. The medico-scientific expertise frame, imposed by the guidelines, heavily dominated our observations, but frequently caused distress and misunderstanding. Temporary or sustained use of the compassion and/or medical authority frames could help to repair the discussion and create the conditions that enable women/couples to reach a decision. Variations in configuration highlighted the differences between practitioners in the two countries. Conclusions Combining frames allows protagonists to exert reflective abilities and to maintain/restore interactions. The frame analysis promotes a vision of autonomy that is sociological, relational and processual rather than philosophical. The frames are anchored in different structural conditions in England and France.

The onset of acute illness may be accompanied by a profound sense of disorientation for patients. Addressing this vulnerability is a key part of a physician’s purview, yet well-intended efforts to do so may be impeded by myriad competing tasks in clinical practice. Resolving this dilemma goes beyond appealing to altruism, as its limitless demands may lead to physician burnout, disillusionment, and a narrowed focus on the biomedical aspects of care in the interest of self-preservation. The authors propose an ethic of hospitality that may better guide physicians in attending to the comprehensive needs of patients that have entered “the kingdom of the sick”. Using philosophical methods, the authors explore what compels people to present to emergent medical attention and why altruism may not offer physicians a sustainable way to address the vulnerabilities that occur in such situations. They then present the concept of hospitality from a Derridean perspective and use it to interpret a narrative case of an on-call paediatrician caring for an infant with bronchiolitis to demonstrate how this approach may be practically implemented in the acute care hospital context. Hospitality allows physicians to acknowledge that clinical presentations that are routine in their world may be disorienting and frightening to patients experiencing them acutely. Further, it recognizes that the vulnerability that accompanies acute illness may be compounded by the unfamiliarity of the hospital environment in which patients have sought support. While it is unlikely that anything physicians do will make the hospital a place where patients and caregivers will desire to be, hospitality may focus their efforts upon making it less unwelcoming. Specifically, it offers an orientation that supports patients in navigating the disorienting and unfamiliar terrains of acute illness, the hospital setting in which help is sought, and engagement with the health care system writ large.

Linden and Yarnold1 recently proposed classification tree analysis (CTA), a machine‐learning procedure, as an alternative to conventional methods for analyzing mediation effects in treatment-outcome research. They note that CTA may have a number of advantages in this regard. It requires no assumptions about the distribution of variables or the functional form of the best-fitting model, for example, thus affording greater potential flexibility in identifying complex forms of association among variables with varying scales of measurement (e.g., binary and continuous). The authors further argue that CTA, unlike conventional approaches to testing mediation, “will not generate a model if a treatment-mediator-outcome relationship does not exist” (p. 359) and, conversely, that CTA “will systematically identify a treatment-by-mediator interaction if it exists, as well as any other interaction between variables.” (p. 359). Using data from the Job Search Intervention Study (JOBS II), they find that structural equation modeling, a conventional approach to testing mediation, failed to indicate support for job-search self-efficacy as a mediator of the effects of the intervention on whether the study participant was reemployed at follow-up. In contrast, the authors conclude that CTA applied to the same set of variables revealed that job-search self-efficacy was a mediator of intervention effects on employment among those in the treatment group.There are, however, two problematic aspects of the authors’ approach. First, as they point out, causal inference of a mediational pathway depends on the assumption that the associations involved exist net of potential confounding variables. In a randomized control trial such as JOBS II, confounding of the association between the mediator and outcome is of particular concern.2 The authors seek to address this concern by conducting a CTA that includes a set of 9 potential confounders (e.g., income, age, initial level of depressive symptoms) as candidate predictors. This approach does not ensure statistical control for these variables, however, for at least two reasons. First, there is no guarantee that the variables involved will actually be included in the resulting classification tree; failing to meet the criterion for inclusion does not rule out the possibility that a given potential confounder or combination of such confounders nonetheless share an association with the mediator and outcome to an extent that renders their association non-significant. This concern proves pertinent to the authors’ analysis as only 3 of the potential confounders earn entry into the resulting classification tree for reemployment status. A second concern with the approach taken by the authors is that whatever covariates are included in the classification tree may be included in positions that are inadequate for the purpose of controlling for confounding of the mediator-outcome association. Gender, for example, in their analysis is included in the control group branch of the tree, whereas job-search self-efficacy, the potential mediator, is included only in the treatment group arm. As a further example, education is included on the treatment group arm, but only after job-search self-efficacy’s role in the model already has already been established through its inclusion on a higher tier of the model. An alternative approach for addressing confounding in the context of CTA would be to residualize the candidate mediator on possible confounders and then fit a classification tree with this adjusted variable. If the residualized mediator continues to discriminate across levels of the outcome, conditional on treatment status, it could be concluded that the mediate-outcome portion of the potential mediational pathway of interest is evident independent of the measured confounders. Applying this approach, I find that the job-search self-efficacy continues to emerge as a discriminating variable for reemployment in the treatment arm branch of the classification tree that I fit with the same JOBS-II data. However, it cannot be assumed that this more rigorous approach to taking into account confounders will always yield the same result as one in which they are merely included as candidate predictors within a CTA.A more fundamental concern with the CTA approach to identifying mediation employed by the authors is that the mediator in the predictor-mediator and mediator-outcome segments of the mediational pathway are not assured of having a consistent definition. This is a result of the optimal cut-point on the mediator being determined separately for the two segments, through an optimal discriminant analysis for the treatment-mediator segment and CTA for the mediator-outcome segment. Thus, in the case of the mediational pathway for reemployment, treatment status predicts a dichotomous measure of job-search self-efficacy determined by a cut-score of 3.92 (i.e., high job-search self-efficacy corresponds to values above 3.92 and low to values equal to and below 3.92), whereas the dichotomous measure of job-search self-efficacy predicting reemployment is determined by a different cut-score of 4.92. Yet, it is essential by definition that the mediator in a mediational pathway that is influenced by the initial variable in the pathway (in this case, treatment) be the same variable that then influences the outcome (in this case, reemployment). In this case, nearly one half of the sample (47.3%; n = 426) has a different high-low classification on the job-search self-efficacy, suggesting considering divergence between the versions of this variable determined by the respective cut-scores. One approach to addressing this concern would be to define a new mediator that reflects the overlapping portion of the differing definitions. In the present example, this could be a dichotomous measure of job-search self-efficacy defined by a cut-score of greater 3.92, which would ensure that all those with scores classified as relatively high on the measure continue to be classified as such; alternatively, a cut-score of 4.92 could be used if priority is given to ensuring that all those classified as low remain in this category. Still another option would be to use the mid-point between the two cut-scores of 4.42. One could then evaluate the mediational pathway of interest using one or more of these options. Applying this approach using PROC CAUSALMED in SAS3, allowing for the suggested treatment-mediator interaction and including all covariates, I find evidence of an indirect mediated pathway when using the lower bound cut-off score of 3.92 for job-search self-efficacy (Odds Ratio for natural indirect effect of .959, 95% CI limits of .893, .998), but not when using the other two cut-off scores, although the differences in estimates are admittedly small in this case (complete results are available upon request).To summarize, Linden and Yarnold (2018) make a significant contribution by introducing CTA as a promising strategy for identifying mediated effects in intervention research. Further refinements to their approach, however, are recommended to more fully incorporate fundamental assumptions that accompany all tests for mediation as well as to evaluate and confirm potential mediational pathways using conventional procedures.References1Linden A, Yarnold PR. Identifying causal mechanisms in health care interventions using classification tree analysis. J Eval Clin Pract. 2018;24:353–361. https://doi.org/10.1111/jep.128482Imai K, Keele L, Tingley D. A general approach to causal mediation analysis. Psychol Methods . 2010;15:309‐334.3Yung, Y, Lamm, M, Zhang, W. Causal Mediation Analysis with the CAUSALMED Procedure . Paper SAS1991-2018. Cary, NC: SAS Institute Inc.; 2018.

The COVID-19 has posed a wide range of urgent questions: about the disease, testing, immunity, treatments, and outcomes. Extreme situations, such as pandemics, call for exceptional measures. However, this threatens the production and application of evidence. This paper directs evidence production towards four types of uncertainty in order to address the challenges of the pandemic: Risk, Fundamental uncertainty, Ignorance, and Ambiguity. Eliminating ambiguity, being alert to the unknown, and gathering data to estimate risks are crucial to preserve evidence and save lives. Hence, in order to avoid fake facts and to provide sustainable solutions we need to pay attention to the various kinds of uncertainty. Producing high quality evidence is the solution, not the problem.